A Different View of Search – Google isn’t quite standing still on search, though they’re certainly not rolling out user interface revolutions at a fast pace. Still, a visit to the Google Labs Experimental Search page gives you a few things to pay with. The latest thing they’ve rolled out is the ability to take search results and plot them on a map or a timeline, or integrate images directly into the main search results.
The additional info doesn’t seem to slow things down and may even be helpful, though I’d rather Google spotted the helpful views and showed them to me automatically. If you’re on the lookout for Google tweaks, it’s also worth having a look at the CustomizeGoogle extension for Firefox.
Site Snooping – If you can overlook its attempts to sell you SEO services, BuiltWith is actually a reasonably useful way to figure out what’s behind a particular site that you’re interested in. Type in a URL and click Lookup, and you can find out where it’s hosted, what it’s using for server technology, and a bit about the web tech on its home page. There are also links to do further lookups at sites like Alexa, Compete, Technorati and DomainTools.
Automatic Photo Enhancement – As a jack-of-all-trades web developer, I find myself needing to tune up photos from time to time, but not often enough to really invest the time or money in learning PhotoShop. If you’re on the same boat (and you use a Mac), then Jade is worth a look. It handles things like deblurring and contrast and color enhancement automatically, without requiring a lot of manual intervention, to just improve the pictures you already have. 30-day demo available.
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